


The Dark Dream is Over

by Triskaideka



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, LLF Comment Project, More Like Dragging Someone into the Light Kicking and Screaming, Not a Redemption Arc, Other, Quest: Tirion's Gambit, Run-On Sentences, Self-Indulgent, Tirion's Gambit is a pivotal moment ripe for exploration, Wrath of the Lich King, background Tirion Fordring & Darion Mograine (semi-adoptive father-son dynamic)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27949460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triskaideka/pseuds/Triskaideka
Summary: Jaina investigates a ghost story in Icecrown, changing the course of the war.
Relationships: prior Arthas Menethil/Jaina Proudmoore
Comments: 10
Kudos: 15





	The Dark Dream is Over

**Author's Note:**

> “Rise up then, […] and be healed of Your dying; the dark dream is over, and awakening is come!” — _The Book of Night With Moon,_ Diane Duane
> 
> “It was awful... I dreamt I was fighting against my friends.” —Fallen Hero's Spirit on [Quest: The Fate of the Fallen](https://www.wowhead.com/quest=14107/the-fate-of-the-fallen#comments:id=835505) daily from the Argent Tournament.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hypothesize, test, refine.

_It couldn’t be real_ , Jaina told herself. She was reading meanings into unrelated events, ones that couldn’t be anything more than random happenstance.

The string of coincidences strained credulity, though: after chasing her through his inner sanctum and across the length of that treacherous mountainside path to freedom while forbidding her escape with barriers of ice, she had believed nothing remained of her childhood friend and former lover. In light of their previous escapades, relying on ice to hem her in looked very shortsighted; she distinctly remembered confiding that fire had taken her longer to gain proficiency in back when they were young and untried.

But then again, he had let her creep about the citadel uncontested—she knew he’d seen her; knew it with the certainty of the Light that those flame-engulfed eyes had only pretended to slide past her invisibility spell. Had let her ascend to the dais atop the chained spear of ice, had let her lock eyes with the piteously burnt prisoner spread-eagled like a trophy by thick chain links above the Frozen Throne. Had let her leave that unholy place with her life, fleeing as if she’d seen his sins writ in blood on the frost-rimed walls that closed off throne and dais and individual at the heart of this conflict from physical assault.

Only after her debriefing did the disparate clues coalesce into first shock, then denial, and finally unshakable confidence in her theory. His actions only made sense if she forgot every detail she knew about him.

Jaina gave little credence to fanciful tales of ghosts on the almost completely lifeless glacier. The kaldorei ghosts roaming the valley floor in Crystalsong Forest didn’t approach soldiers and adventurers with inexplicable favors in mind, and their deaths absolutely counted as tragic! Conversely, however lightly the dead of Lordaeron rested, they haunted her not at all despite her role in the nation’s collapse.

But multiple stories had filtered through the ranks—not just of the Valiance Expedition, but verifiable ones originating with Garrosh Hellscream’s band of disorganized peons with shoddy weaponry—that the ghost of a human child repeatedly approached loners on the glacier only to draw them through strange replays of seminal events from the Third War before dumping them down a hole with an icy lake at the bottom. So far, by the fortune of the Light, no one had died carrying out the apparition’s bidding—but the growing list of near-misses meant the law of averages would catch up to an undeserving victim sooner rather than later.

Laid up to recuperate for several days after her narrow escape, she burned political capital on favors allowing her to pore over the scattered reports corroborating those unbelievable rumors. A heart, watched over by the ghost, and seemingly forgotten below the citadel? More than one hypothesis could explain it, including the strange affinity between a ghost and what anchored it to the world—but equally likely it had to do with the layered traps the Lich King set. To leave his heart unguarded… The conundrum kept her arguing fruitlessly with herself until the healers certified her able to return to action.

And so Jaina had avoided the watchful eyes of his minions to arrive at the secret location she’d ferreted out thanks to her unsanctioned research. There she had carefully eyeballed the angles to cast her Slow Fall spell at the right moment, letting the cross-breeze waft her to the shore of that jumped-up pond where the ghost child reportedly waited. Assorted husks of dead nerubians lay unmoving across the way but otherwise nothing else so much as quivered down here save for the wind. Left with no friendly portal back to the surface as the reports had claimed would appear, she—

Wonder of wonders, she could sense the residue of a portal on this spot. It bore the earmarks of hedge magic rather than the much-refined working of a Kirin Tor disciple, but plenty of folks never underwent the specialized training they deserved. All the same, it tugged at her in a way reminiscent of… no memory that she could call up for identification. A psychoactive layer? That gave her reason to reassess her initial impression of its caster’s expertise. She probed the spell again with a filament of the arcane. It responded with a resonance of latent nostalgia so overwhelming that it left her gasping.

When she cautiously tested the point once more, the psychoactive component had dissipated, leaving a cleverly hidden third spell in its place. A shrewd means of protecting their secrets, almost as if whoever set it up expected a practitioner of high caliber to happen upon it and indulge their curiosity. She doubted an everyday type would have seen through it while focused on escaping nerubian territory before an untoward fate befell them.

Weaving a shield spell took but a moment, and then she began examining the hole in the world for booby traps. Granting the Scourge the last laugh through sucking her soul from her body due to a moment’s incaution would just be the worst end to an already fraught investigation. She was almost disappointed by the lack of a final magical guard on so tempting a puzzle piece, but the Scourge rarely showed flashes of outright brilliance; theirs was more the way of overwhelming might concentrated on any point, weak or not, until it catastrophically gave way.

From within the hole, like a pocket carved into reality, she withdrew an oblong metal box with no apparent means to spring it open. When she lifted it overhead to squint at the bottom, she felt a shift in weight that signaled some sort of item, or items, within. Now _this_ promised an enigma worthy of an archmage’s prowess.

Teleporting back up to ground level, she found the gryphon she’d ridden out still waiting, blessedly displaying no outward signs of impatience or anxiety. Mysterious box in hand, she mounted and carefully arranged the heavy prize to perch vertically between her thighs and chin, thanks to a distressing lack of saddlebags. Then she spelled them both to invisibility before ordering her rented steed to spiral into the sky. Out of the shadow of the citadel’s edifice they soared, making for safety among the clouds massing above his stronghold, like the promised eventual arrival of the Light’s justice.

His flight of wretched frostwyrms didn’t perform sweeps this far south of the Conflagration, leaving the air patrols to gargoyles that otherwise waited like vultures on the ramparts around the citadel entrance and its colossal front staircase. Nevertheless, she wouldn’t start to believe herself out of danger until she touched down in Dalaran, even now peering and scanning about in the cloudy half-light for anything out of the ordinary.

Speaking of: what was that gathering of figures in robes outside what the allied armies jocularly referred to as the Cathedral of Darkness? Vanishingly few cultists managed to cloak themselves with an air of menace like that. She signaled her desire with the reins and clenched her leg muscles around her find as the gryphon banked gamely. Despite the anonymity of the robes, their assorted body types suggested Crusaders, Alliance soldiers, or even apprentice mages as plausibly as cultists. And yet some out of place detail about them nagged at her.

Another closer pass might alert them to her presence; no invisibility spell guaranteed passing undetected when wind currents from flapping wings got factored in. No, she could do her curiosity one better by landing around the corner and sneaking up on foot. After splitting the spell between herself and the gryphon, she crept up with the box in hand, since setting metal on flagstone would absolutely bring down too many Scourge creations to handle on her head.

The presumed cultists operated under a silence that she had only ever seen the most seasoned of soldiers do—or the undead who communed through eldritch means with their dark master. Jaina frowned at them for a solid minute, unable to come to any conclusion about their intentions until one of their number spoke.

“The Lich King will arrive shortly. Steady, my brothers and sisters.”

What harebrained excuse for a plan of attack had brought Highlord Darion Mograine here?!

Until she arrived within whispering distance, Jaina hadn’t realized that she had darted forward. She certainly hadn’t dropped the invisibility spell but Mograine’s eyes swung over toward her regardless. With the hood of his disguise pulled over his helm like that, no wonder she had thought the group looked off.

“Show yourself,” he ordered, brandishing his saw-toothed twin runeblades.

Well, this wouldn’t do. She dropped the spell on herself and fixed Mograine with a questioning look.

“Lady Proudmoore? What are _you_ doing here?” asked one of his entourage. Light, were they all death knights? And that made this one… Thassarian? She didn’t exactly run in the same circles as the Ebon Blade.

“I could ask you the same question.”

“We’re backing up Tirion on a mission. Top secret,” Mograine said shortly. He finally ceased brandishing the blades at her, though he kept them to hand rather than resheathing them.

“You said Arthas is coming here,” she quietly corrected him.

“He _is_ here,” amended a former high elf, and followed up with a nonstandard salute for his commander as if in apology for cluing Jaina in on their purpose.

Glowing blue eyes eerily akin to the Lich King’s own searched her face. “See for yourself,” Mograine grunted, indicating the interior of the cathedral with the blunt end of one frost-shedding shortsword. She appreciated his commitment to the safety of the sole living person in the immediate vicinity.

Taking a step into the loose ring of death knights, as if they served as palace guards of old, Jaina stood on tiptoe to peer into another benighted place. Yes, a hulking figure crowned with a spiked helm stood in a pool of flickering light cast by candles and coldflame alike. As she watched, he gestured with that great and terrible blade, its runes aglow with the antithesis of the Light’s warmth.

“Tirion seeks to destroy the frozen heart if the Light doesn’t intervene and prove that there’s something left of ‘your Arthas,’” Mograine muttered from uncomfortably close to her ear. The mockery stung but over the years she’d had to grow used to it; their doomed relationship lived on in the public imagination no matter what she did. As painful emotional levers went, he could only have chosen a more cutting one if he knew her on a more profound level.

Her hands shook facing the specter of her failures again so soon. Inside the box, the tempting items rolled into one of the inner walls and clicked loudly.

“What—?” Mograine said, looking down and then up again at her face. “Where did you find that?” The force of his gaze felt too much like the Lich King trying to force his way inside her soul.

“Down—where the heart was found,” Jaina said, mindful of the drama unfolding within spell’s reach. It looked like one of the high-ranking cultists inside was about to cast a spell on the heart…

“Let me see it,” he said urgently. At last those blades went back in their sheaths with a hiss of metal against leather. Jaina handed over the box, silently noting that her reservations warred against the instincts shouting that they stood on the precipice of an important discovery.

Mograine’s hands took turns first supporting then flying over the unmarked surface of the box, and where his fingers passed over, strange runes appeared and faded in turn. The box opened.

“How did you know to do that?” Jaina asked.

“The Scourge sometimes share—memories. Of other lifetimes. It’s not important.” Mograine held the container down low enough for them both to peer inside. That illuminating evasion, though…

Jaina stifled a cry of recognition, her hand heedlessly darting over to pull a tiny locket from within. “He kept it?” she whispered as her fingers worked the clasp and revealed a painting of her own face, rounded and innocent in youth. Her awareness of the goings-on within the cathedral receded somewhat, overtaken by memories.

Mograine also dipped a hand inside and came out with a crystalline shard. “He… he must have deposited this after the Light of Dawn…”

“What is it?” Jaina asked.

“My father’s soul shard,” Mograine whispered with great reverence. In imitation of Jaina, conscious or not, he held it up before the eye holes on his helm, putting Jaina in mind of a jeweler. Perhaps he sought to commune with it as a paladin would with the Light.

Out of respect for his pain, Jaina tore her gaze away and immediately spotted another familiar object. “Lord Uther’s Silver Hand badge…”

“And a vial of… I would say blood,” Mograine added. “Yes. Blood… of the Banshee Queen. I—remember.” He shuddered with distaste and lifted the crystal to the level of his forehead, where he pressed it against his helm for several seconds with his eyes closed as if drawing strength from it.

“These others are trophies but… he wouldn’t have kept the locket while I still draw breath—unless—” Jaina’s head whipped around toward the Cathedral of Darkness and the inevitable confrontation between agents of the Light and its opposite number. “There is still a part of him trapped, struggling! He _wanted_ me to find the box—! Oh, Darion! We can’t let Tirion destroy the heart!”

 _“What?!”_ Mograine said, and it was echoed by the entire squad of redeemed death knights ringing them.

“The heart was a red herring! If Tirion destroys it, he seals Arthas’ fate and we still have to destroy the Lich King and then find a replacement, just like Lord Uther warned me!” Every piece of the puzzle clicked together, the logic unassailable, but she knew she had presented too little evidence for her audience to join her in coming to the only possible conclusion. Not with so little time remaining before their last options ran out. “Please, for the love of the Light, Darion, don’t let him destroy that heart!”

“Are you out of your mind? This is the day we’ve been working toward; the day you living have been praying for,” Mograine growled.

She stood her ground against his disbelief, lifting her head defiantly. “So you would condemn him to the Light’s final judgment without leaving it any chance to redeem him.”

“Nothing he could do or say would make him worth redeeming. Are you blind to the atrocities he’s committed? Did you let him steal your soul in the Frozen Halls?”

How could he be so simultaneously well informed and pig-headed ignorant?

“You’ve forgotten the miracles the Light is capable of. Stand aside,” Jaina hissed. She shucked her gloves for better fire control; taking out the cultists from here presented her no difficulty. A few steps forward should afford her a slightly more advantageous angle, however.

A moment later, as she tried to shoulder her way through the front line of death knights, a hand on her coat collar yanked her off-balance. “You couldn’t take him down solo before and this isn’t your personal army, your ladyship,” Mograine said in her ear.

So far they hadn't drawn unwanted attention from within the cathedral, likely thanks to keeping their voices down. In that vein, she shot back, “If he destroys that heart, are you the one who’ll take over as jailer of the damned?”

Mograine didn’t have a glib response to that. She almost felt bad for escalating, but if he’d rather stand here holding another’s mementos, consumed by memories and regrets, she wouldn’t stop him. Awkwardly reaching over her shoulder to prise her coat free of his fingers, she added, “Don’t you dare lose what’s in that box, either.”

“I said this isn’t your personal army; I didn’t say we’d let you go in alone!”

Ignoring how Mograine thought himself sufficiently informed to judge her, Jaina switched tactics, saying, “I have an idea but it requires your help.”

After all, skilled leadership sometimes meant swallowing one’s pride, particularly when potential allies just wanted to feel important. Besides, the window for action was rapidly closing: Tirion had done away with his cultist disguise and she could very faintly hear him haranguing Arthas between gusts of glacial wind.

“Tell me what you would have of us, my lady,” Mograine said. With great reluctance and not a little sarcasm, true, but she would take the victory and ignore the rest. Ironing out soldiers’ rough mannerisms was a fool’s errand.

“Glass cannon maneuver? He’ll be expecting it,” muttered the former high elf, the one who’d saluted, to his nearest companion.

“If this is your first time seeing Lady Proudmoore in action, you’re in for an explosive experience,” Thassarian replied. He even winked conspiratorially when he noticed her attention on them.

Jaina let a feral smile tug at her mouth. The Scourge _would_ know what hit them; she was far removed from the harried and unsure apprentice reacting to their machinations.

She answered Darion now that the commentary had died down. “Keep the Scourge off me. I’ll retrieve the heart.” Simple, and therefore effective.

“My lady, you’re a bit… noticeable,” Thassarian said. The protective streak was unexpectedly pleasant.

“He’ll—they’ll have other things to worry about,” Jaina asserted. The irony was not lost on her of death knights like these having been developed to deal with mages like her. Not given the death knight from whose trailblazing example they were copied. “There’s no reason to expect me and we’re out of time, prepare to be teleported in!”

Jaina heard the shush of cloth as they removed the cultists robes, followed by the creak of leather and jingle of saronite as the knights readied their weapons. Too late to concern herself over the fate of an unmarked box among the detritus. She raised her hands to cast the spell, her unblinking stare once again zeroed in on the drama unfolding in the back of the cathedral as Tirion lifted the Ashbringer to destroy a barely perceptible pinprick of concentrated darkness.

She allowed herself a heartbeat’s worth of doubt: her upcoming role would require precise calculations on the fly to claim the heart without injuring Tirion and without ending up on the receiving end of the Lich King’s wrath.

Her spell took them inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fandom-blind context:
> 
> Takes place following Jaina's journey through the Frozen Halls, culminating in [this conversation](https://wow.gamepedia.com/Frostmourne_\(quest\)#Notes) which occurred in the Halls of Reflection.
> 
> On the matter of the “[ghost child](https://wow.gamepedia.com/Matthias_Lehner).”
> 
> The box contains most of the same items as the [Unsealed Chest](https://wow.gamepedia.com/Unsealed_Chest) from the Shadowmourne questline, although I took liberties with the location and removed a large item for the sake of my narrative.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the LLF Comment Project, which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback (please, _no concrit_ , this is my fun hobby), including:
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * “<3” as extra kudos
>   * All-caps keysmashing/emoji strings
>   * Lamentations for your lost love whose absence is a source of grief to this day
>   * Reader-reader interaction
> 

> 
> This author replies to comments. Readers who would prefer not to receive a reply to comments, please state something like "no reply necessary" and I'll just stare with heart eyes at my inbox.


End file.
